IAMCR's next conference will be held in Hyderabad, India from July 15-19, 2014. Usha Raman, a member of the Hyderabad Local Organising Committee, provided information on the conference theme, location and the host institutions during the closing plenary of IAMCR's Dublin conference.
Visit the conference website at IAMCR2014.ORG
The theme: Region as frame: politics, presence, practice
The breaking down of some walls has created an uncertainty about the geographies and substantive nature of the regions they had once defined. This includes physical boundaries such as the Berlin wall, ideological ones such as those in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, economic ones such as those that had once separated India and other socialist economies from the capitalist West, and cultural ones such as those that had hidden the lives of people in the middle Eastern and Soviet bloc. Mobility, migration and disembodied interactions of cyberspace further complicate the notion of region as a conceptual and experiential category. New regional hierarchies, such as the economic power of emerging economies (BRICS) are taking shape, serving to decentre traditional loci of power, while different forms of identity politics are creating fissures in the modern nation state. Corporations have acquired the power to dictate politics through their ownership of forms and channels of expression, and this has created a new urgency to re-think old political economy arguments around media control and dispersal in a regional rather than global framework.
The conference theme seeks to explore the dynamics of media systems, communication patterns and organizational relationships within this new “framing” of region as a physical and conceptual category.
- What are the politics that drive media discourse, organization and economics?
- What kind of presence is at all possible in this redefined regional space, and how does region become a real and imagined construct across new media presences?
- What sorts of practices then become key to media and communication spaces enclosed in or defined by this new frame?
The place
Hyderabad is India’s fifth largest metropolis in terms of population and is one of the fastest growing on several counts. It has a 450-year-old history, traces of which coexist almost seamlessly with the new glass-and-steel edifices of the digital age economy. Located in the geographic heart of the county, Hyderabad has long been a meeting place for several cultures, and represents an ideal location for the cultural, intellectual and ideological meeting ground that IAMCR represents.
The local hosts
The Department of Communication at the University of Hyderabad, located within the Sarojini Naidu School of Arts & Communication, is one of the country’s leading University departments for higher studies in communication and journalism. Established in 1987, the department offers well regarded master’s and doctoral programmes that attract students from around the country. Having begun with a focus on documentary production and communication for social change, the department now has faculty with a wide range of interests, including film studies, community media, media historiography, cultural studies, health communication, new media, and media production. Recognized by Outlook magazine for past three years as the top University department of communication in the country, the department houses the world’s only UNESCO Chair on Community Media . The School has been identified by Research Councils UK (RCUK) as a Centre of Excellence.
Established in 2008, The School of Communication of the English and Foreign Languages University is quite young, having been in existence for close to five years. The English and Foreign Languages University, formerly the Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages (CIEFL) is an Institution of repute in the area of English Language Teaching and Training worldwide. The School of Communication boasts of three departments which offer a five year integrated programme in Mass Communication and Journalism, a two-year post graduate degree in Media and Communication while the third department offers a doctoral programme in Film Studies & Visual Communication, the only such programme in the entire country.